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Grocery Truck Brings Healthy Food to New Mexico Pueblos

A custom-built mobile-grocery truck is traveling throughout New Mexico, delivering healthy food to pueblos.

"MoGro," as the truck is called, visits the Kewa Pueblo in Albuquerque twice a week. It offers fresh produce, dry goods and other foods that can be difficult to get on the reservation.

"Today, they have more access to information than ever, information about the importance of good nutrition for health, but they have no access to the food itself," Rick Schnieders, the owner of MoGro, told The Santa Fe New Mexican.

Schnieders started the store after the restaurant nonprofit dedicated to ending child hunger, Share Our Strength, connected him with the Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health in Albuquerque. Through John Hopkins' pilot studies, he learned that a prime concern of American Indians was the loss of their agricultural tradition and the unavailability of good food.

So he embarked on a mission to eliminate sugar-heavy foods by bringing healthy, affordable and sustainable food to the pueblos, many of whom reside 50 miles from a grocery story.

"Part of this process is really educational," Schnieders told The Santa Fe New Mexican. "In the pueblos, they had a strong agricultural tradition, which was destroyed by USDA commodity products. We're having this conversation in all the pilot communities now, they're talking about farmers markets and school gardens. And we're encouraging them."

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